The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for managing patient care in a health care facility, and more particularly, to systems and methods for assessing the severity of averted medication errors.
Medication errors, that is, errors that occur in the ordering, dispensing, and administration of medications, regardless of whether those errors caused injury or not, are a significant consideration in the delivery of healthcare in the institutional setting. Additionally, adverse drug events (“ADE”), which are a subset of medication errors, defined as injuries involving a drug that require medical intervention, and representing some of the most serious medication errors, are responsible for a number of patient injuries and death. Healthcare facilities continually search for ways to reduce the occurrence of medication errors. Various systems and methods are being developed at present to reduce the frequency of occurrence and severity of preventable adverse drug events (“PADE”) and other medication errors. In the administration of medication, focus is typically directed to the following five “rights” or factors: the right patient, the right drug, the right route, the right amount, and the right time. Systems and methods seeking to reduce ADE's and PADE's should take these five rights into consideration.
Delivery, verification, and control of medication in an institutional setting have traditionally been areas where errors can occur. In a typical facility, a physician enters an order for a medication for a particular patient. This order may be handled either as a simple prescription slip, or it may be entered into an automated system, such as a physician order entry (“POE”) system. The prescription slip or the electronic prescription from the POE system is routed to the pharmacy, where the order is filled. Typically, pharmacies check the physician order against possible allergies of the patient and for possible drug interactions in the case where two or more drugs are prescribed, and also check for contra-indications. Depending on the facility, the medication may be identified and gathered within the pharmacy and placed into a transport carrier for transport to a nurse station. Once at the nurse station, the prescriptions are once again checked against the medications that have been identified for delivery to ensure that no errors have occurred.
Typically, medications are delivered to a nurse station in a drug cart or other carrier that allows a certain degree of security to prevent theft or other loss of medications. In one example, the drug cart or carrier is divided into a series of drawers or containers, each container holding the prescribed medication for a single patient. To access the medication, the nurse must enter the appropriate identification to unlock a drawer, door, or container. In other situations, inventories of commonly-used drugs may be placed in a secure cabinet located in an area at or close by a nurse station. This inventory may contain not only topical medications but oral, intramuscular (“IM”)-, and intravenous (“IV”)-delivered medications as well. Nurse identification and a medication order number are typically required to gain access to the cabinet.
The nurse station receives a listing of drugs to be delivered to patients at intervals throughout the day. A nurse or other care-giver or other qualified person reads the list of medications to be delivered, and gathers those medications from the inventory at the nurse station. Once all of the medications have been gathered for the patients in the unit for which the nurse station is responsible, one or more nurses then take the medications to the individual patients and administer the dosages.
Such a system may not be capable of thoroughly verifying that the appropriate medication regimen is being delivered to a patient in the case where IV drugs are being delivered. For example, a nurse may carry an IV bag to a particular patient area, hang the bag, program an infusion pump with treatment parameters, and begin infusion of the medication. However, even where the right medication arrives at the right patient for administration, incorrect administration of the medication may occur where the medication is to be administered using an automated or semi-automated administration device, such as an infusion pump, if the automated device is programmed with incorrect medication administration parameters. For example, even where the medication order includes the correct infusion parameters, those parameters may be incorrectly entered into an infusion pump, causing the infusion pump to administer the medication in a manner that may not result in the prescribed treatment.
One attempt at providing a system with built-in safeguards to prevent the incorrect entry of treatment parameters utilizes a customizable drug library which is capable of monitoring the parameter entry process and interacting with the care-giver should an incorrect entry or an out of range entry be attempted. In such a case, an alert is communicated to the care-giver that the parameter entered is either incorrect or out of a range established by the institution where care is being provided. Even though these customized drug libraries have provided a significant advance in the art for avoiding medication errors, they do not differentiate the alerts based on the severity of the medication error. It would be advantageous to provide an assessment of the severity or the “harm potential” of detected medication errors to enable the care-giver to respond more appropriately to each error.
Additionally, various methods have been used to record all of the activities surrounding the delivery of a treatment regimen, such as providing an infusion pump with a memory dedicated to storing a record of events related to a particular treatment. For example, in one system, an infusion pump has a memory in which treatment information, including treatment parameters, patient identification, care-giver identification and other information, is stored for later retrieval. Alternatively, the infusion pump may be programmed to store information related to only certain events occurring during treatment delivery, such as the occurrence of alarms or other alerts. Reports providing the details surrounding these alerts may be generated for review by the institution in order to assess current practices and identify ways to improve IV medication administration safety. However, these reports generally provide raw data that requires additional analysis before it is useful to an institution. Therefore, it would also be advantageous to provide an assessment of the severity or harm potential of each averted medication error to improve the institution's retrospective analysis of medication errors.
Hence what has been recognized as a need, and has heretofore been unavailable, is a system for managing patient care which includes assessment of the harm potential associated with averted IV medication errors to further improve delivery of health care to patients. The system would further be capable of providing appropriate alerts at the point of care on the basis of severity of the detected medication errors. The invention fulfills these needs and others.